S. Mitra Kalita is currently the senior vice president for news, opinion and programming for CNN Digital. Kalita leads the national news desk and efforts to creatively share CNN’s journalism and storytelling across an ever-exploding array of platforms. Prior to this appointment, she served as managing editor at the Los Angeles Times.
Before Kalita’s Spencer Fellowship year, she was the ideas editor at Quartz. She worked previously at The Wall Street Journal, where she oversaw coverage of the Great Recession, launched a local news section for New York City and, most recently, reported on the housing crisis. She also launched Mint, a business paper in New Delhi, and has previously worked for the Washington Post, Newsday and the Associated Press.
She is the author of three books related to migration and globalization, and speaks seven languages (but only four of them well). She is an adjunct professor of journalism at St. John’s and Columbia universities, and previously served as president of the South Asian Journalists Association. Born in Brooklyn, Mitra was raised in Long Island, Puerto Rico and New Jersey—with regular trips to her grandparents’ villages in Assam, India. She lives (and eats) in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of New York City, along with her artist husband and two daughters. She tweets @mitrakalita and her website is www.mitrakalita.com.
She spent her Spencer Fellowship reporting a book on school choice through the lens of one New York City neighborhood. Her reporting took her to Ferguson, Missouri to examine the aftermath of the police shooting.
More of her work can be read at: http://qz.com/author/smkalita/ and http://mitrakalita.com/articles-page/